"Silksong's Low Price Is Causing Devs To Re-Evaluate Their Own Games"

[kane_magus]

Full headline: "'I Can't Afford To Give It Away For Free' - Silksong's Low Price Is Causing Devs To Re-Evaluate Their Own Games"

Personally speaking, all Silksong's "low" price of $20 means is that I'll be waiting until it is in the $5-$10 range or lower before buying it (if I ever buy it at all, given that I've never bothered to complete the first Hollow Knight game). As far as I'm concerned, Silksong's price has nothing to do with the price of any other games. That said, I can see where these devs are coming from. Though, if anything, I think most other devs (especially the AAAAAAAA devs) tend to over-inflate what their games are worth, and the devs of Silksong are actually being more reasonable (relatively speaking).

Comments

[goldpseudo]

I find it ironic that back when Hi-Fi Rush came out, I heard nothing but praise for its price point since it was effectively an AAA game released at a price you'd expect of an indie game (like $25, iirc). I don't recall any significant indie backlash against having affordable high-quality games eating their cake back then.

[kane_magus]

Or famous "indie" game Dave the Diver, which also released at $19.99 USD, same as Silksong, and is still that now when not on sale. I don't remember people complaining about that one being "too cheap," either.

(The only debate I've ever heard specifically about Dave the Diver is whether it's "indie" or not [it's not], despite being nominated for "Best Indie Game" at the 2023 Game Awards, which says more about the Game Awards than it does about Dave the Diver, but I'm getting off topic.)

[owsf2000]

As someone who has watched the base/reg price of indie games on my wishlist (that have been sitting there for years) go UP in the last 10 years, I'd have to agree with one of the commenters that effectively said:

"Indie games have generally been going up in price and down in quality for years so i welcome what Team Cherry are doing and hope it will encourage smaller developers to start putting in greater effort and justifying the prices they set."

If anything I think it's the other way around. The EXCESSIVE price tags being applied to AAA titles that are released in near (or sometimes completely) nonfunctional states with low effort being applied to really any aspect of the game that have been causing the lizard brains of these beasts we'll call "indie devs" to think "ok THIS is what a pretty but nonfunctional and unplayable game should be priced at. I guess we can charge more for ours then."

[kane_magus]

Yeah, the AAA modern video game industry has completely FUBARed what "normal" means when it comes to video games nowadays (if you define "nowadays" as "for the past decade or two, at least," anyway), via the actual broken, unplayable, piece of shit "games" that they regularly spew out, and via all the extra bullshit they slather on top of the "games" (even in the increasingly rare event that said games might have otherwise been perfectly fine if not for all that extra shit), and, of course, via the increasingly absurd prices they're charging for all the aforementioned dogshit.

Rather than taking it as a sign of what not to do, too many indie devs are deciding to just jump on the bandwagon themselves. For every Hollow Knight: Silksong or Vampire Survivors[1], there are hundreds of barely functional asset flip "games," or more and more AI-slop-art filled "games," or "games" that try and fail to ape whatever recent flavor of the month AAAA thing (or, you know, ape other indie darlings like Hollow Knight or Vampire Survivors), and if that crap gets priced at even half of what modern AAAAA games are priced at now, they'll still be in the $35-$50 USD range, at the very least.

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[1] - As a sidebar, Vampire Survivors still costs less than Silksong, even with all of its gameplay DLC taken into account, which brings it to $17.94 USD. If you also include the soundtrack at $2.99, that puts it at $20.93, or 94¢ above Silksong's price.[2] And that's after the whopping $2 price increase that the base Vampire Survivors game itself got, back in 2022. If you count just the VS base game, then it's still dirt cheap even compared to Silksong. Apparently, VS got a few complaints of being "too cheap," similar to this stuff with Silksong, but I don't recall having seen them myself at the time. I mean, sure, I heard a lot of people saying "wow I can't believe it's so cheap, that's amazing" (and I felt the same way myself), but I don't recall any actual complaints about it, even if they were ostensibly there. Here's the thing though. If I had the means to do so, I could conceivably make a sprawling epic like Baldur's Gate 3 or Final Fantasy Remake or whatever, and then I could charge just 1¢ for if I wanted, and anyone who complained that I was selling my game "too cheaply" could eat my entire ass. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't do that, even if I had the ability to do so, but I could do that, and it would be nobody's fucking business but my own.

[2] - Or, more specifically, Silksong's current base game price, anyway. No idea if it will ever get paid DLC. The original Hollow Knight never got paid DLC, aside from two separate soundtracks (though it did get several free content updates as patches). And I don't count soundtracks as DLC for the game itself. But if Silksong ever gets paid gameplay DLC, that'll throw everything here off, of course.